iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

False alarm here it was just a couple of due dates that I missed adjustments for. Front and back end are now aligned but it still remains to be seen if it stays that way come November when the time change, or lack thereof, occurs, or doesn't occur.

210

So now idk what to do until the non- time change occurs (or doesn't occur) in November! The university and/or system haven't made any announcements about this, I'm just discovering how this is failing in real time

000

Wait wait wait. It is only in some views/pages that the time adjustment is shown. The back end pushed everything 1 hour back. So now my adjustment forward an hour makes things look an hour early instead on the front end

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Who knew permanent daylight savings time would come with an extra labour cost?! /s

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BrettC, Ph.D. @brettc.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

Because Alberta is not reverting back to standard time in November, all of the dates & times after that point that I set in my LMS have been pushed back an hour, so I now have to adjust them back to the times that I intended (and initially set not two weeks ago).

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They should make a cell phone that's just an orb. I wish to ponder the blue sky on my orb.

BrettC, Ph.D. @brettc.bsky.social · 22/06/2026

I would also like to announce that I will step down from the office of prime minister of the United Kingdom, at some point in the future.

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BrettC, Ph.D. @brettc.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

Yeah but wasn't that for supporting Palestinians and pro-palestinian campus protests and encampments. Lately he's been playing a show every summer here at the Calgary Stampede, but I think he mainly sticks around Seattle

Ice cream you scream we all scream GAY RIGHTS (and WRONGS)

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Alex Hanna @alexhanna.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

POV: language change in action

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Reposted by BrettC, Ph.D.

If you missed it, you can watch a replay of the Luddite Lab Resource Hub launch at the @dairinstitute.bsky.social PeerTube channel. We discuss the Hub and have an incredible conversation with organizers Anna Iovine, @benjaminharnett.com, and Pomai Neil. peertube.dair-institute.org/w/4evWrVsa7i...

peertube.dair-institute.org

Luddite Lab Resource Hub Launch Webinar

We're excited to publicly announce the release of DAIR’s newest resource: The Luddite Lab Resource Hub! This webinar, recorded on May 20, 2026, includes a short demonstration of the Resource Hub to...

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Love to teach about grammatical voice in my Modern English Grammar course every spring semester, just generally, but also because it tends to occur during my birthweek, as a little gift to me and my students. I give grammatical voice to us! Grammatical voice is given! Grammatical voice gives!

I asked my partner from Ontario whether they had ever heard of the saying "God made dirt, dirt don't hurt" and they laughed, shook their head, and said that was the most Southern (US) thing they'd ever heard me say.

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Or "beepa boopa" if autocorrect doesn't get in the way

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To compromise, you clearly must make the Juhuri Word of the Day their word for "beeps boopa"

BrettC, Ph.D. @brettc.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

But in the best ways, right?

010

Reading "happy Eid" without hearing it is probably what caused me to go down this rabbit hole of phonological wonderment!

Particularly in phrasal "Eid Mubarak" rather than one-off word-borrowing of Eid in "Happy Eid"

I think you're spot-on with the question of whether it's loaned or code-switched. If code-switched, it would inherently be more faithful to Arabic. Mapping that on to my experiences, I usually hear the word from Muslims who would be much more likely to code-switch than non-Muslim Anglophones

Is the itch being a consumer in capitalism? Is the itch acquiring new technology? The world may never know.

Addendum: I should probably just learn Arabic so I'm more informed about what's happening in both languages.

So what's going on here? Is my perception/experience wrong or maybe I've phonologically misinterpreted things by pronouncing the initial ʿayn as a vowel rather than omitting it in English? Or are the dictionaries obscuring the truth of the matter of the pronunciation of "Eid" in English? 4/4

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The original (Modern Standard) Arabic is عيد and the transcription given on Wiktionary is /ʕiːd/ (NB: I am not a speaker of Arabic by any means). This has an initial consonant ع /ʕ/ ʿayn, which often sounds to my English ear/brain like a vowel /a/. So this may colour my perception in English. 3/4

But (as I do with all of my social interactions) I second-guessed whether that pronunciation of "Eid" was acceptable. So I looked at various online dictionaries entries for the word and they uniformly report the English pronunciation of "Eid" as /id/ (or /iːd, both essentially EE-d). 2/4

At the end of class today a student wished me happy Eid in text chat, and I wished them happy Eid back in voice, but it got me thinking about how that Arabic-borrowed word "Eid" is pronounced in English because I've always perceived it as /aɪd/ (essentially EYE-d) so that's how I pronounced it. 1/4

you'll never guess who's involved (it's pinker. somehow, it's always pinker)

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How did they not suggest a term "cot-court merger"?

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how do we know it's never not market manipulation

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They're totally setting up an invasion of Cuba with the stated reason of kidnapping a 94 year old man btw

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al with the important questions

BrettC, Ph.D. @brettc.bsky.social · 19/05/2026

If not for your family name, history, or traditions, then at least as an emblem of your time at Edinburgh! The University of Calgary has its own official tartan, so I'd be more inclined to wear that than the Erskine one tbh! 3/3

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BrettC, Ph.D. @brettc.bsky.social · 19/05/2026

But I've lived in Canada for almost 10 years now, and, as @carrieg.bsky.social stated, tartan-wearing is a bit more prevalent here and any "rules" seem to be a bit more lax than what I had presumed. 2/3

BrettC, Ph.D. @brettc.bsky.social · 19/05/2026

My brother drums in a Scottish-American drum corps in New Orleans and wears an Erskine tartan kilt even though we're 3 generations removed from being Erskines and we've no closer Scottish ancestry (everything else is mostly Danish and French). So I thought it was a bit odd. 1/3

Like the reason (most?) institutions ask students to provide a phonetic transcription of their names is because name spellings can be so easily misconstrued by humans and certainly by machines. This is a baffling decision.

030

Bringing this back to prosody, the line break really leads people to reading this as two trochees rather than: /ˌpup.'tæs.tɹə.ˌˌfiz/ But after 6 years I'm also just now noting the spelling of the final syllable as <ies> rather than <es>, which compounds the misinterpretability here!

I show this during my Intro classes' morphology lessons, and students usually struggle to identify the blend members at first. I often have to adjust it to be unbroken on a single line: <pooptastrophies> to make the blend more apparent.

The facilitating effect of orthography on recovering the blending members of <hiddentity> contrasts with the hindering effect of orthography in the blend rendered in the iRobot ad shown below.

A square advertisement that appeared on Instagram.

Mostly green text on a very light yellow-green background. The text reads:
"iRobot
No more
pooptas
trophies."

There is a trail of grey paw prints along the bottom right edge of the ad.

I wouldn't say it makes me uncomfortable but the stress shift does delay recovery of the initial member of the blend, particularly if I'm listening to or saying the word while not reading it.

Does pin-pen merging the second vowel to /ɪ/ help out with stress clash at all? (New Orleans English is surrounded and infiltrated by English speakers with pin/pen merger. So I have an incomplete merger and can go both ways with this one)

BrettC, you're being Weird on main. Go back to work

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One of the few things that keeps me grading through Grader's Block is the prospect of finding (or generating?) a normal distribution.

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Are normal distributions inherently Good/Right or have I just been trained to find them Aesthetically Pleasing?